I used to work in tech support for a large company with retail outlets. The company’s retail employees would call in if they were having problems with their POS (that’s point-of-sale, you potty-mouth!) systems. Most of the time, the first thing we’d have the caller do would be to reboot the computer and/or make sure that everything was plugged in and powered on. The instructions were borderline insulting to most callers with any kind of technological prowess, but it would take care of the problem often enough to make it worthwhile to make them try.

A month or so ago, I started using an old Capital One card that had been dormant for a while. I went back to it because I travel internationally and make foreign currency transactions fairly regularly, and CapOne is, as far as I know, the only card issuer that does not levy a foreign currency transaction fee (in other words, not only do they not levy their own fee but they eat the fee that MasterCard or Visa charges them). I don’t like using a lot of separate cards, so I decided to use this as my primary card.

I tried to make a payment on it from my WaMu bank account about a week ago and the payment was returned. I tried again, waited a few days for the payment to clear, and in the meantime I called CapOne to ask them to waive the late payment fee, which they were kind enough to do. But the second payment attempt still hadn’t hit my WaMu account. Frustrated and a little concerned, this time I called WaMu.

The customer service rep at WaMu was incredibly nice, but the first thing he said was, “Go into your Capital One information and make sure you have the routing and account numbers correct.” It was the bank CSR equivalent of “verify that your computer is plugged in.” DUH, I was thinking, of COURSE I made sure that the numbers are–

Oh. Well, look at that. I never put in my WaMu information at all. CapOne still had my old, old bank account information from a (now closed) account at a totally different bank.

Never mind. Sorry! Thanks for your help!

(And now I feel bad about asking CapOne to waive the late fee, because it was pretty much totally my fault. There may still be finance charges, which I will pay if they show up on my bill.)